"I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being." --Hafez

​ 229 days soberA nurse whose name I can’t remember is sewing Stohler’s head shut.

Alright. That’s probably not the best way to look at things. The rational part of my brain—the tiny, easily ignored, usually-buried-under-the-finer-points-of-a-manic-episode, rational part of my brain—is telling me that everything is okay. Everything is okay. The police took our statements at the scene of the accident, and the wreckage of the Ferrari was towed to a shop on the outskirts of New Haven. I called my mom, and my mom called my dad, and they both know not to panic when the USAA insurance agent contacts them about my car. The paramedics who responded to my 911 call clocked the gash tracing Stohler’s hairline and strapped her to one stretcher; when they realized how gingerly I was rubbing the back of my neck, they choked me out with a neck brace and strapped me down on a second stretcher. It was pretty humiliating, but it got us through the waiting room quicker than any of the people who walked into the hospital on their own two feet.

Now I’ve been checked out by a doctor, offered an ice pack that I graciously accepted and a vicodin that I vehemently refused, and sent along to the curtained-off space that constitutes Stohler’s room. And a nurse who I was introduced to, but whose name I can’t remember is sewing Stohler’s head shut.

When Ben got his stitches last October, I couldn’t even be in the room for it. Tonight, I won’t let myself look away, because I know that this one is my fault. Each time the point of the needle dips back into her skin, each time the nurse dabs at the wound to keep the blood from rolling down Stohler’s cheek, that’s on me. My broken cell phone is a lead weight in the pocket of my jeans, and every time I blink, I can see Dave’s text seared into my eyelids. I never should have let this happen. If I couldn’t keep him away from me, I should’ve at least kept him away from the people I care about.

“You’re incredibly relaxed for someone who was sitting shotgun in a car as it was smashed to half its previous size,” I say.

Stohler’s eyes have been closed while the nurse works, but she cracks one open to look at me then. “Well, I did take an anesthetic shot to the face a few minutes ago, so that helps. Besides, I figure one of us should probably keep her shit together. And since you claimed the crying-and-shaking-and-calling-your-daddy role before we even got to the hospital, I guess that means I’m supposed to be the stoic one.”“I only called my dad because the car is on his policy. He would have panicked if he heard about the crash from an insurance agent instead of me,” I say. “He said that I can use his other Mercedes until we figure out what the insurance covers. It was a vintage car, so I’m guessing—”

“Fuck insurance, dude. If they can find the guy who rammed your car, I’m suing,” Stohler says. I straighten up so that I’m no longer resting my weight on the counter behind me. Stohler looks like she wants to roll her eyes, but is trying to stay still enough to keep the nurse’s needle out of her eye socket. “Don’t look at me like that. Every single part of that crash was deliberate. They followed us, and they smashed into us at the light, and they back up and rammed us six times. I’m not going to hand-wave that kind of shit aside. If the cops can hunt down whoever was driving the Tahoe, I’m filing a lawsuit, I swear to god. And you should, too. Nobody should get to attack you like that and then just walk away, like nothing even happened.”

Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I’m just too used to Dave hurting me and getting away with it.

“I’m going to go get some air,” I mutter. “By which I mean, air full of smoke, ‘cause I need a fucking cigarette.”

“Make sure you avoid the non-smoking areas near any of the hospital entrances,” the nurse says absently, the bulk of her attention focused on tying off another of Stohler’s stitches. “There’s a bench down the block where people usually go.”

The first thing I do when I get to that bench is light a cigarette. The second thing I do is take out my phone and bring up the text from the accident. I read it so many times over that I can’t even see it as a complete message anymore. A car--god, my fucking car, my dad must fucking hate me. It cost so much money, and he bought it for my sixteenth birthday, and we sank even more money into it when it was vandalized last fall, and now it’s fucked beyond belief--for a car—I never should have let any of this happen. I should’ve stopped Declan from ever getting out of bed that night, I should’ve kept him far away from Dave and his stupid fucking Lexus. It’s my fault that Stohler’s hurt now. She’s getting her goddamn head sewn shut because I’m this bitter piece of shit who can’t just man the fuck up and get over something that happened when I was fifteen. And eighteen. It doesn’t matter when it happened, I went to rehab twice, I’ve been in therapy for fucking months, I should have gotten over it, I should be stronger than this--babe—there was a time when that word out of Dave Walczyk’s mouth was enough to put me on my knees. In a good way, too. There was a time when I would have done anything he asked me to because all I wanted was to make him happy, and it makes me sick now to think that there was ever a part of me that was happy because of him, before all the rest of it started--I thought you’d learned—but I never learn, do I? I got away from him when I was fifteen years old, I left him, and then I went back for more, and I hope it would be better but I knew it would be worse, and he almost killed me--not to piss me off—I wish I were dead. I do. I really, really do, I wish Stohler hadn’t been in the car with me, and I wish Dave had run me off a bridge or something, I wish he would just fucking kill me already, instead of hanging onto me like this, instead of keeping me waiting for it.

“Garen.”

My cigarette slips from between my fingers and rolls down into the palm of my hand, the lit end thankfully only hitting skin that’s too calloused to feel a burn. Cursing, I shake it to the ground and stagger to my feet, staring blindly into the dark, terrified down to my bones and trying desperately to blink back the wetness that began obscuring my sight I don’t know how many minutes ago. He’s here, he’s here, he’s here, fuck--

But he’s not here. It isn’t Dave.

It’s Alex.

“What are you doing here?” I demand.

“Stohler texted me about the crash. She asked me if I could grab her purse out of her apartment and bring it here so she’d have her insurance card. I just dropped it off with her, and she said you were out here,” Alex says. He hitches his chin at me. “You okay?”

I nod.

“Cool,” he says, and he grabs the front of my shirt and yanks me into a hug.

For a moment, I don’t really know what to do. Alex and I have hugged each other before, I’m sure of it, but I can’t for the life of me remember when. Part of me suspects that the last time we really put our hands on each other was that drunken fuck the night I relapsed in September, and if that wasn’t enough to make things awkward, the fact that I’m still kind of ripshit about him punching Ben in the face last weekend sure as hell would.

But then he mumbles somewhere over my shoulder, “I’m glad you’re alright. Shit, G. The way Stohler was describing the accident, I got so freaked out. You could’ve fucking died. I’m so glad you’re okay.”

“Yeah, we’re fine,” I say, finally reaching up to clutch at the back of his jacket. Hugging Alex right now feels like I’m betraying Ben, or Jamie, or both of them, but I don’t know how to make myself let go of him now that I’ve latched on. I’ve never been good at handling anything on my own.

After too long, Alex releases me and steps back. “Who have you told about the accident so far?”

I shrug, and a hot stripe of pain lays itself across my shoulders. “Dad. Mom. Cops? You, I guess, but Stohler’s the one who—”

“What about Jamie?” Alex interrupts.You don’t get to fucking call him Jamie anymore, is the first thing I think. I’m on the brink of snarling it at him, but I know it’s a petty, irrational sort of statement. I swallow it down, shake my head, and say, “I can’t call him. My phone got smashed in the accident.”

“You can use mine. I don’t think I have his number stored anymore,” Alex admits, “but considering how creepy and codependent you two are, I’m guessing you’ve got it memorized.”

“I can’t call him,” I repeat. The words feel caught in my throat, like they might turn into a sob if I’m not careful. “Al, his parents. You know what happened. If I call him and tell him I was in a car crash, he’s going to lose it. I can’t do that to him. I can’t tell him.”

From just outside the glow cast by the street lamp overhead, Stohler’s voice makes me jolt. “Fine. You don’t have to tell him. Alex will.”

“Alex won’t,” Alex says, looking alarmed.

Stohler narrows her eyes at him. “I’m sorry, did that sound like a suggestion? Because it wasn’t. I’m tired of this shit. I just got fifteen stitches in my head because Anderson doesn’t have enough sense to own a vehicle with airbags, and this anesthetic is only going to last so long, and when I asked the nurse about painkillers, she told me I’d be fine with Tylenol. Now I’m supposed to have one of my asshole roommates check on me every hour, which they’re probably going to refuse to do, so I’m almost definitely going to slip into a coma and die while I’m sleeping—”

“You can stay at our place tonight,” Alex blurts out, “I’ll sleep on the couch. You can have my bed, and once Ben gets home from New York, he and I will take turns checking on you.”

“—and I am not in the mood to put up with any more drama from the Lost Boy circle-jerk,” Stohler barrels on, like Alex hasn’t said a word. “This is why I spend more time with Ben than with either of you. He doesn’t throw temper tantrums. He handles his shit like an adult, and it would be genuinely fabulous if you two could learn something from that. Garen, you’re talking to James, whether you want to or not. Alex, you’re making the call.”

It feels a lot like getting put in time-out, which is kind of bizarre. Usually the only people who yell at me like that are my mom and Ben.

“Lost Boy circle jerk,” I say. “As in Peter Pan and a bunch of underage boys in culturally appropriative costumes? Or as in Kiefer Sutherland with a bleached mullet and big dangly earrings?”

“Either,” Stohler spits.

“I feel like I’d look weird with earrings,” I admit. “Weirder wearing a war bonnet, but still. Besides, they’d probably get infected. I hardly ever remembered to do the saline soak when I got my lip pierced the second time, it’s a miracle I even have a lip now. I wouldn’t trust myself to take care of two piercings at once.”

“Ben’s thinking of getting his done,” Alex tells me. “He told me before, you know, the fight. Said once his next paycheck comes in, he’s getting either his ears or his nose pierced.”

“No bullshit?” I say, looking around at him in surprise. “Nostril or septum?”

“Right? But now that I’ve had a week to get annoyed about it, I’m pretty sure he’s holding off on that because he doesn’t know if his boyfriend would be into it.” Alex pulls a face. “Can you even imagine James sleeping with a guy who has pierced nipples?”

I tip my head back to squint up at the street lamp, considering my answer. “Healed piercings, sure. Something he can tug on in bed. But if he’s gotta be careful with them during the first few weeks, I don’t—”

There’s an unmistakable snick of a switchblade being released. My heart falls through my suddenly hollow ribcage, thunks into the bottom of my gut, and starts screaming at me, Dave’s here, he’s here, he came back for you, he’s here, even though I can see the switchblade right now, and it’s not in Dave Walczyk’s hand. It’s the same one that Stohler dumped out of her purse a month and a half ago, the day she shaved my head. Now, she has fished it out again and is aiming it lazily in Alex’s direction.

“Get your phone out and call Goldwyn,” she orders.Put the knife away, Stohler, put the knife away, anyone could come here and take it from you, anyone could use it against you, against Alex, against me.

“I don’t have his number anymore!” Alex protests, shuffling back a half-step to put a bit more distance between himself and the switchblade.

If Dave showed up and yanked that knife right out of Stohler’s hand, it wouldn’t even be the first time he attacked me with one. There was one night when I was fifteen, maybe two weeks before I balled up enough to leave him. We were standing in the kitchen of the Ward house, and there was a party going on, but we were the only ones in the room at the time. Dave told me it was time to go back to his dorm, but I knew what would happen in his dorm. I told him I wanted to stay at the party, and we argued about it. He grabbed my arm to drag me bodily from the house, and in a display of bravery that was pretty rare at the time, I latched onto the handle of the refrigerator door and refused to be moved.

He yanked on my arm. “Do you think this is funny, Garen? Do you think you’re being cute?” I promised him that I wasn’t trying to play games, I promised him that I only wanted to stay for a little while longer. He pulled my arm again, told me to take my fucking hand off the refrigerator door handle. I said no. He opened one of the counter drawers, took out one of the paring knives we all used to slice lime wedges for shots, and held it to the back of my wrist. “You want to leave your hand there? Fine. The rest of your body is coming home with me.”

He sawed the back of my wrist open in two quick, drunken jabs—would’ve done more, would’ve cut down to the bone right there in the kitchen at a house party, if he thought he had to. But the blood all over the stainless steel made the fridge door handle too slippery to hang onto, and he stopped cutting once I let go. I was in tears before we even left the house; by the time we reached the edge of the Patton property, he was, too. He tore a strip from the lining of his coat to use as a makeshift bandage, crushed me to his chest, and sobbed “I didn’t mean to hurt you”s and “I love you”s into my hair.

“Fine,” Stohler says to Alex. “Call Ben instead. He probably hasn’t left Goldwyn’s place just yet, and I know you’ve still got his number.”

Another shuffle backward. “We’re in a fight. He won’t pick up if he sees my name on the screen.”

The idiocy of that statement is so overwhelming that it momentarily silences the flashback-scream inside me, and I blink around at Alex. “Remember that time I spent two months trying to steal Ben’s boyfriend while I was spiraling down into alcoholism and drug addiction? And remember how his reaction to that was to dump said boyfriend, drive across three states, kidnap me from a bus station, and literally carry me home again? He’ll pick up. In fact, the two of you being in a fight right now makes it even more likely that he’ll pick up.”

“He’s almost as much of an emotional masochist as he is a physical one,” Stohler agrees.I nod, but don’t look at her. I don’t want to see the knife again, and even though it sounds like she’s folding it up and putting it back in her purse, I’m afraid to check, in case I’m wrong.

Alex heaves a sigh, but he must realize that he’s still on thin ice with us at this point, because he digs his phone out of his pocket and makes the call.

“Ben, hi, it’s… it’s Al,” he says, wincing at his own awkwardness. “Listen, are you still at Jamie’s place? No, no, no, that’s good. I’m, uh… I’m kind of at the hospital with Garen and Stohler.” He pauses, listens, rolls his eyes. “Yes, the hospital. They were in a car accident. It was pretty bad, G’s car was totaled, but they’re both—can you stop repeating everything I say? I need you to—what—oh. Uh. Heyyyy, James.” Alex shoots me an alarmed glance. “No, they’re fine, I—no! Of course they’re not dead, dude, Jesus. They—what? Oh. Yeah, totally, that’s—”Alex thrusts the phone at me and blurts out, “It’s for you.”

“I hate my friends,” Stohler informs a complete stranger who happens to be walking by with his dog. The man ignores her, except to walk faster. Stohler frowns and gives the dog the finger.

I yank the phone out of Alex’s hand, damn near taking his thumb off with it. “Jamie?”

“Garen, what the fuck happened?” Jamie croaks.

All at once, this situation is impossible to handle. I sink right down onto the curb and curl in on myself, face tucked to my knees, phone clutched so tightly I’m afraid I might crack the screen. “James. Fuck. My car. My fucking car.”

“Are you hurt? Please, I need you to tell me you’re alright,” Jamie says, his voice barely audible. It’s not like he’s whispering, though; more like he’s breathing out the words. Gasping.

“I’m alright,” I promise, but I can’t think of anything that would be a bigger lie. There’s no way I can sit here with a text from Dave Walczyk on the phone that’s in my pocket and still feel like I’m really alright. “The Ferrari was totaled. We… we got rear-ended at a stoplight by someone who was going way too fast, and the engine got trashed.” Stohler opens her mouth like she’s going to snap out a protest loudly enough for Jamie to hear. I hold up a hand to stop her, glaring my warning at her. If Jamie is going to find out the full extent of what happened, he’s going to find it out from me, and he’s going to hear about it in person. I continue, “We’re going to be okay. The doctors checked me out, and I’m perfectly fine. Stohler had a cut on her head, but they stitched her up, and she’s going to stay at Alex’s tonight so he can keep an eye on her.”

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Jamie asks me.

“I told you, I’m fine,” I say.

“Don’t you dare lie to me, Garen Michael Anderson.”

“You’re not my mother, James Jackson Goldwyn, you can’t intimidate me by busting out the middle name,” I say. “I’m not lying to you. I wouldn’t ever lie to you, and you know that. I’m shaken up, and I’ve got some whiplash, and my car got fucked beyond all belief, but I’m going to be okay. I promise.”

“When can I see you? When are you coming back to New York?” Jamie asks. It sounds a lot like begging. “Your car is out of commission, I know that, but you can take the train back, can’t you? I’ll let you have my Cadillac for as long as you want it. Lord’s sake, I’ll sign it over to you. You can have the damn thing. I hardly ever drive it anyway, and i-it’s a good car. It would hold up if you ever got into another crash. I’ll sign the title over to you the second you get here. Just come back to New York, please—”

“You’re not giving me your car, idiot,” I say gently. “Dad’s letting me have the second Benz. I’m driving back to New York tonight. Do you want me to come straight to you?” Jamie barely gets out a noise of assent before I start talking again. “I’ll do that, then. Give me two hours, and I’ll be there.”

When Ben speaks, his voice is close enough that I don’t even know if it counts as background sound. He must be standing near enough to hear me, because he says to Jamie, “I’ll stay here with you until Garen arrives. I can take a later train home.”

There is a short pause, and then Jamie clears his throat and asks stiffly, politely, “Do you think you might be able to spend the night here instead? You could return home in the morning. That is, if you were comfortable with that.”

“Good,” I say, even though they aren’t really speaking to me. “Good, that’s—good. Dad told me I can come by and get the car anytime tonight, so I’ll go—I’ll get Alex to drive me to go pick it up?” I look around, and Alex nods his easy agreement. “Right. Alex is going to take me. Then I’ll come straight to your place, yeah?”

“Be careful,” Jamie orders. His authoritative tone might be a bit more convincing if I couldn’t hear the quaver in it. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. I’ll see you soon,” I promise.

The process of picking up the Mercedes from Dad’s house, driving to Jamie’s apartment, and parking in the garage under his building feels like something out of a dream. I’m paying attention to my driving, maybe even more than usual, but I’m watching the road the way the way I’d watch a movie, like it isn’t really there. My hands feel numb on the steering wheel. I know that the radio is on, but I can’t hear any of the music. That feels like the worst part.

When I get up to Jamie’s apartment and open the door, the first thing I see is an open bottle of merlot in the center of the dining table. There’s no glass next to it, but the corkscrew is sitting out, the cork still speared on the tip. I hate myself for noticing that before anything else.

Ben is standing in the kitchen, alone, drinking a glass of water. He sets it down when he hears the click of the door closing behind me. “Garen. How are you?”

“Fine.” I press my lips together. There’s no point lying to Ben now. Never was. He’s seen through my bullshit since we first became friends. I push out a heavy breath and admit, “Shitty, actually. Shaken up. Neck hurts. And I need Jamie. Is he in his room?”

Ben raises a hand and points. “Terrace. Go see him, and I’ll make you an ice-pack for your neck. You can come in for it whenever you’re ready.”

If I thought driving here was a blur, it’s nothing compared to how fast I cross the living room.

Out on the terrace, Jamie is leaning against the stone balustrade and staring down at the glitter of headlights on the street below. A mostly empty wineglass, a pack of Nat Sherman Black & Golds, a matchbook, and a crystal ashtray are neatly lined up across the stone next to him. There’s a lit cigarette in his hand, but it has turned almost completely to ash without being smoked.

I spoon up behind him and tuck my chin over his shoulder. “Think you can spare a few seconds from your Old Hollywood moment and give me a drag off that?”

“Only got here a few seconds ago.” I bury my face against Jamie’s neck and breathe him in. Every year, when spring starts to turn into summer, he switches his fall and winter cologne out for something warm and woodsy. Right now, I want to curl up in his bed with him and his blankets and his scent, and I want to never fucking leave. “Ben told me you were out here. He’s not joining us, though. He’s making me an ice pack.”

Jamie stubs out his cigarette against the stone and squirms around in the circle of my arms so that he can face me. “An ice pack? Why do you need an ice pack? You swore to me that you were fine.”

“I told you on the phone, my neck got kinda fucked in the crash. My back, too. I’m sore, but it’s really not a big—”

“Of course it’s a big deal,” Jamie hisses, and shame swells up under my ribcage. Who the hell am I to tell him that it’s not a big deal for his best friend to get in a car wreck less than two months after a different car wreck kills both of his parents? He balls the front of my shirt up in one fist—the other hand is busy gathering up his wineglass—and urges me back towards the door. “I want you to go lie down.”

“I don’t need to lie down!” I protest as he hip-checks me over the threshold and back into the living room. “I’ll sit down, alright? But I’m not going to let you treat me like I’m an invalid, because I swear, I’m okay. You know me. If I was actually injured, I’d be milking this for all it’s worth. You know how dramatic I am.”

“Everyone who has ever met you knows how dramatic you are,” Ben says.

He spares himself from a glare when he steps forward and raises an improvised, dish-towel-and-ice-cube cold compress to the back of my neck. It doesn’t do that much to ease the twinge in my neck, and it does absolutely fuck-all for the ache that has wound tightly around the full length of my spine, but he’s trying to be helpful, and I can’t fault him for that. I take the ice pack and offer him a brief, grateful smile.Jamie strides over to the kitchen table and sets his wineglass down. He refills it from the open bottle of merlot, takes a sip, and frowns down at the bottle, like he’s not quite sure it’s good enough. One of Jamie’s biggest disappointments back in my early drinking days was his realization that I have no real appreciation for wine. I’m good on the theory of it—I know which kinds of wine to pair with which dishes, and I know that most reds and full-bodied whites should be poured into large-bowled glasses, and I know how to saber a bottle of champagne, which feels as badass as it looks. But the second it comes time to actually drink anything, I suddenly stop giving a shit. Wine is wine, and hard liquor is hard liquor, and who fucking cares whether it tastes good or not? Some people probably drink for the flavor or the sophistication of having a nice selection of bottles to dip into when company comes over, but we’re fucking teenagers. Teenagers drink to get drunk.

Tonight, Jamie seems to agree. He drains his glass and pours another generous splash into it before he returns to the living room. “Alright,” he says, leaning against the side of the entertainment unit and looking expectantly up at me. “I would like to hear the complete story, if you don’t mind.”

“The complete story of what?” I say. Jamie purses his lips. That doesn’t make me want to answer him seriously, though. I push forward. “The complete story of, like, existence? ‘In the beginning, there was the Word.’” I look around at Ben. “That’s it, that’s all I’ve got. Help me out, Father McCutcheon.”

The only thing that Ben loves more than he loves religion is launching into awkward, verbatim recitation of incredibly boring books. He is probably physically incapable of stopping himself from saying, “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.”

“Benjamin,” Jamie says sternly.

I sit down on the couch and pat the space next to me. “Ben. Come here. Come tell me what happened after the bit about the abyss and the wasteland.”

“Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” Ben blurts out, looking increasingly horrified at himself. “God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night’--”

“And on this night, you will find yourself sleeping on the couch, if you don’t stop that immediately,” Jamie snaps. Ben presses his lips together and sinks into one of the leather armchairs. Jamie eyes him for another moment before turning his attention back to me. “Garen. Tell me the complete story of the accident, because I am not an idiot. I know you left something out when you called me from the hospital. I could hear it in your voice.”

I could lie. There isn’t technically anything stopping me. I could tell him that I was only lying about how much my neck hurts or how bad Stohler’s head injury was because I didn’t want him to worry. He would fuss over me some more and put me to bed, and I could pretend nothing was really wrong. I could lie, if it was anyone but Jamie.

“The driver backed up,” I say.

Jamie’s brow creases. “What are you talking about?”

“The other driver. He hit my car when I was stopped at a red light, and then he backed up, gunned it, hit me again. Rammed the Ferrari straight through an intersection and up onto someone’s garden wall. Hit us again.”

“Somebody ran into your car three times?” Ben asks, blue eyes so wide that I can see the full circles of his irises.

I shake my head, even though it shifts the ice pack off the spot where it’ll do the most good. “Six.” Ben blinks. I decide that staring at the corner of the coffee table is a safer option than continuing to meet his gaze. “They hit us six times before they drove away.”

“So, when Alex said that you were in a car accident,” he says hoarsely, “that wasn’t entirely accurate.”

I shrug. “Guess not.”

“You guess not,” he repeats. “Garen, running into a car once is an accident. Twice is deliberate. Six times is a fucking murder attempt.”

I flinch so violently that the ice pack slips right off the back of my neck and hits the floor with wet smack. “Don’t say it like that. He was angry, but he wasn’t trying to kill me,” and fuck, how many times have I said that before? If any of my friends find out that Dave Walczyk was involved in this, they’ll never let me out of the house again. I quickly amend, “This guy, the other driver. He had road rage. That’s it. I’m not saying it’s okay that he totaled my car, alright? I’m pissed about that, fucking obviously. But it was some psycho with road rage, not—not a murder attempt.”

Ben makes a noise of disbelief, and Jamie… doesn’t. In fact, this might be the longest Jamie has ever been silent during the four and a half years we’ve been friends, and when I look up, my heartbeat stutters and lurches. There’s a detached, unfocused kind of horror in Jamie’s eyes, and he is so, so still, like he’s afraid he’ll break if he dares to move.

His gaze flickers in my direction, but shifts away again almost immediately. His jaw is clamped shut, and his thin shoulders are hunched inward. For one horrible instant, I think he’s trying to stop himself from puking. He sucks in a tiny, shallow breath, then tries for another, and another, both hands coming up to his throat. One wrenches at the knot of his tie, and the other claws open the top button of his Oxford.

“James,” Ben says, reaching out, but not touching him yet. “Come over here and sit down. I’ll get you a glass of water, okay? And Garen will—”

Jamie throws out a hand, not to touch Ben, but to keep him at bay. He says hoarsely, “I’m fine. I’m fine, don’t—I need a moment. May I-I have a moment? Can I just…” He shudders and heads for the door to the terrace again.

I launch myself after him. “Jamie, wait.”

“Please, I just need a moment. I need some air. Please. Please.” He shuts the door firmly behind himself. Through the glass, Ben and I watch as he begins to pace back and forth over the balcony. He moves as if to loosen his tie further, but his hands are trembling too badly.

I’ve had plenty of panic attacks before, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one this bad from the outside. It’s so much more terrible than I ever could have guessed.

“We’re going to give him two minutes,” Ben says quietly. “If he’s not back in here after that, I think we should go get him and bring him back inside.” I don’t have to glance sideways to know that he’s still watching Jamie, too.

“When we were at school together, he had some problems with anxiety. Not… not always like this, not usually this bad. But you know, midterms would roll around, or he’d have a bad breakup, and he’d get really worked up. He’d take something to calm down, get his head right. I can check his room and see if he’s got anything.”

“We’re not stopping his panic attack by getting him high,” Ben says sharply.

“I don’t want to get him high, you fucking idiot. It’s a prescription. He doesn’t take it all the time, not like Travis and his antidepressants, but he’s supposed to use it as needed. I can’t even remember what it is—Xanax, Klonopin, Valium. Some kind of benzo. If he can’t calm down on his own, we’ll have him take a dose,” I say.

On the terrace, Jamie has his palms pressed to his torso, as if he’s studying the movement of his diaphragm to make sure he’s still breathing. He hasn’t stopped pacing.

“The prescription bottle is under the tray in the valet box in his closet,” I say.

“In the what?” Ben asks.

“Valet box. It’s this polished mahogany case, a little smaller than a shoebox. Full of watches and cufflinks and fancy crap like that. The meds are in there,” I say. Outside, Jamie reaches blindly for the door handle, fumbling a few times before he manages to find it. I head for the door, saying over my shoulder, “Ben, go get the box. Now.”

Ben darts off down the hallway, and Jamie staggers in from the balcony, saying, “Christ, Garen—”

“It’s okay, I’m here,” I say, hauling him in against my chest. We’re somewhat lopsided, two grown men of different builds colliding with too much force to be graceful, but I manage to get us to the couch without either of us hitting the floor. Every inch of him is trembling. We cling to each other, and I stroke his hair and say, “Please don’t be upset, baby. I know you’re freaked out right now, but I promise I’m okay.”

“I’m not upset, I’m not—I just, I can’t breathe,” he chokes. “The thought of losing you, how close it was. I can’t, Garen, not now, not so soon after—after I’ve lost them. You’re all I have left.”

I take his face between my hands and ease him back so that we can look each other in the eyes. Or, so that we could, if he didn’t have his eyes pinched shut. I stroke the sharp jut of his cheekbone with my thumb and let my head roll forward so that our foreheads are touching. “And I’m not going anywhere, Jamie. I’m never leaving you. You know that.”

Ben reappears in front of us and drops to his knees, setting the valet box on the coffee table and flipping open the polished lid. He lifts the top tray out and roots around for the prescription bottle. When he shakes a pill onto his palm and offers it up, it takes a minute for Jamie to steady himself enough to even look at it. The response is a visceral, full-body flinch deeper into the couch cushions.

“I don’t need a goddamn Xanax.”

“Do you still feel like you can’t breathe?” I ask. A shuddering breath in the absence of words is enough of a response. “That’s what I thought. Take it, Jamie. You’ll feel better.”

Jamie forces down the pill and chases it with the rest of the wine in his glass. It’d be amusing--that’s my boy—if he didn’t still look so fucked up. Ben takes the glass from him and sets it down on the table, but the last thing Jamie needs to see in the middle of a panic attack is a ring on his coffee table. Wordlessly, I point to the stack of coasters on the end table. Ben slips one under the glass, but he also gives me a look like, really? Is that what’s important?

Jamie leans over in his seat so that his forehead is pressed to his knees, airplane crash landing position. He takes several deep breaths, in and out, while I rub large circles into his back. “You’re going to be okay, babe. Just give the pill fifteen minutes to kick in, and you’ll feel so much better, I swear.”

“A Xanax might help right now, but it won’t stop me from feeling this way the rest of the time,” Jamie says.

“What are you talking about?” Ben asks.

“You don’t understand. Either of you. It feels like a disease. No matter where I go, no matter what I’m doing, I always have it in the back of my mind.” He sits up and digs the heels of his hands into his closed eyelids. “After my parents died, I watched these videos. Crash test demonstrations. I looked up every single vehicle owned by every single person I know, and I watched them hurtle into cement walls and steel barricades and other vehicles. Over and over again.”

After he returned from Georgia, he told me about all the videos he’d seen. That was when he first started ragging on me to get a safer car. I knew it bothered him, but I had no idea it was tormenting him like this. I slip an arm around his shoulders and manage to coax him into something that serves as a decent substitute for a real embrace.

“It’s all I can picture now,” he continues, his voice barely a whisper now. “Every morning, I wake up, and my first thought is, Garen drove twenty-three miles from his home to the Patton campus at four thirty in almost total darkness. I wake up certain that you’re dead, and I wonder if anyone will think to call me once they’ve found you in a ditch somewhere, and I can’t breathe until I’ve seen whatever idiocy you saw fit to text me once you’d finished PT.” He shifts as though he wants to look up, but can’t bring himself to really do it. “And it isn’t as if the nights are any easier. Not with you, Ben. When you text me at the end of your shift to tell me that you’re on your way home and that you’ll call me in half an hour, it’s like you’re setting a damn timer. For the next thirty minutes, all I can do is sit there, paralyzed, and map out every bend in the road, every distraction you might encounter. Lord forbid you have to stop at a gas station and add some time to your trip. Five extra minutes, and I’m convinced you’ve gone and wrapped yourself around a tree.”

Part of me is amazed that I’ve managed to make it to this point in the conversation without crying, but most of me is pissed that I can’t stop myself from starting now. I scrub my cheek against Jamie’s shoulder, drying my tears on his Oxford. The fact that he doesn’t even bitch at me for that is a sign of just how out of it he really is, even though he keeps spilling his guts for us.

“It feels unfair. There’s never been a time in my life when I found myself truly dependent on more people than I could count on one hand. My parents were—they were the most important people in my world, and I lost them. That isn’t fair. No one should have to lose people who are that close to them, no one should ever have to feel”—Jamie lowers one of his hands to his own chest and crumples the front of his shirt in a fist—“how this feels. And I can’t go through this again. I wouldn’t know how to survive it. I count on you both, I need you both, and if I lose either of you the same way I lost them, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself.”

Something flickers on Ben’s face. For a very brief moment, he looks like he’s been stabbed. Then, whatever that look is, whatever that thought is, he extinguishes it. He clambers up onto the couch on Jamie’s other side, but I’ve basically got my best friend in a headlock of a hug right now, so Ben has to settle for resting a hand on Jamie’s knee. He says, “If something happened, you would get through it. It would be painful, and it would be terrifying, and you might think it would break you, but you would get through it. You’re stronger than you give yourself credit for.”

Whatever I was expecting him to say, that definitely wasn’t it. “You need me to do what?”

“Take a shower. You smell like the hospital.” Jamie swallows and raises one of his trembling hands to rake his hair back into some semblance of order. “You always hear people talking about their mothers’ perfume. Something lovely and floral, most of the time. A-And my mother wore perfume on special occasions, certainly, but she was… she was a neurosurgeon. When she came home from work, she smelled like the hospital. It’s how you smell right now. And I need you to take a shower, please.”

I spent a little over forty-five minutes in the hospital tonight, and that was more than two hours ago. I doubt that I actually smell like anything besides myself. Still, I don’t dare say that to Jamie. Instead, I stand, kiss the top of his head, and say, “Whatever you want, gorgeous. I’ll be back in ten.”

I’m not back in ten. I would be—two minutes to brush my teeth, one minute for the water to heat up and my clothes to come off, five to wash my hair and scrub my body down, three to dry off and hunt down a t-shirt and pair of sweats that have migrated from my closet to Jamie’s at some point in the last few years. Zooey is curled up on her enormous cat bed at the foot of Jamie’s real bed, but she is clearly not in a playful mood tonight. She cracks one eye open, lets out a mewl so small that it barely moves her mouth, and then goes right back to sleep.I’m about to go back to my boys when my phone chimes from the pocket of the jacket I’ve left bunched up on Jamie’s bed. The hair on the back of my neck stands up on end, like Dave is suddenly right here in the room with me, watching me. Stupidly, I glance towards the window. All I see are the dark, empty windows of the building across the street. The screen of my phone is cracked, but that’s not much of an excuse. If I could call an ambulance on it earlier and read Dave’s text, I can read… this. Whatever it is. Whoever it’s from. I take a deep, steadying breath, sit down on the edge of the bed, and open my inbox. The new text isn’t from Dave, though. It’s from Declan, three short words--still n CT?

“Fuck,” I whisper, flopping back to lie flat on the bed. I’d completely forgotten that I promised him I’d come back to the Patton campus after Stohler and I went to her club in New Haven. The moment that the Tahoe plowed into the ass-end of my car, everything outside my immediate surroundings has seemed to fade away. In the car, I couldn’t think about anything but the crash. At the hospital, the only thing that mattered was the phone calls I was forced to make to my parents and the stitches in Stohler’s head. Since I pulled into the garage downstairs, all I’ve been able to care about is Jamie. I’ve forgotten about anyone else who might matter.

I make two phone calls, one right after the other, and they couldn’t be more different. First, I call Travis. As soon as I explain what has happened, he’s ready to come right to Jamie’s apartment.

“No, no, it’s fine,” I say quickly. “He’s… he’s still really fucked up by the whole thing, and I don’t think he’d want you to see him like this. We managed to get some anxiety medication into him, but once that really kicks in, he’s going to be embarrassed that Ben saw him like this, and they’re a couple. They’re supposed to be present for this kind of shit.”

“Exactly,” Travis says quietly. “I want to be there for you.”

I drag my fingers through the short, wet tangle of my hair and close my eyes. “I wish you could be. I wish I could be home with you right now, I wish I could go to sleep in your bed. It’s so fucking stupid, but I feel like that would make everything better.”

“God, G.” I can hear Travis forcing a swallow on the other end of the line. It takes a minute before he can make himself say, in a sort-of-joking-but-mostly-not tone, “Alright, you’re staying with James tonight. Can you at least call in sick to school tomorrow so that I can see you then?”

“Travis McCall, you naughty boy,” I gasp. “Who taught you it was okay to break rules like that?”

Fuck, I wish he was here right now. I roll over onto my side. “I’ll have my mom call my school in the morning and tell them about the accident so they’ll mark it as an excused absence. I’ll come home as early as I can, once I’m sure Jamie’s okay to spend the day on his own. Alright?”

“Alright,” Travis agrees. “I love you.”

Hearing those words from him, unprompted, is almost enough to make me lose it. I manage to blurt out, “I love you, too, Travis. Always. I’ve gotta go,” before I force myself to hang up. I can’t afford to get even more emotional than I already am. Not now.

The second call that I make is to Declan, and I feel like I have to be vertical for that conversation. I stand up and begin pacing Jamie’s bedroom. When Dec answers, I figure I might as well get right into it.

“Dave Walczyk tried to kill me and my friend tonight,” I say in lieu of hello.

“What,” Declan says flatly. I rattle off the story—the real story. The drive through New Haven that takes me dangerously close to his apartment, picking up Stohler from her place and seeing the Tahoe behind us, the crash at the stoplight, the five additional collisions, and finally, the text message from the burner phone after the other car had driven off. There is a lengthy silence when I’m done. I drum my fingers against my thigh, waiting. At last, Declan says quietly, “Sam was in the common room when you told us where you were going. And when we met your friends at laser tag and they said they lived in New Haven, Charlie wanted to know if it was near where he grew up. Your girl told him her street.”

It takes a few seconds for that to process, but I’m choosing to blame it on the crash. “And Sam is Charlie’s roommate. So, when Sam heard me say I was going to be in that area, he felt like he had to tell Charlie, and Charlie decided he needed to warn Dave.”

“Which means that Sam is on my shit list, and Charlie is a fucking dead man.” I hear the hiss-click of a lighter being flicked on the other end of the call and feel an immeasurable amount of jealousy that I can’t have a cigarette like Declan is clearly doing right now. I listen to him take a drag, and a while later, he comes out with, “Send me the phone number that Walczyk texted you from.”

“No,” I say immediately.

“Why not?” he demands.

“Wow, I dunno, Dec. Maybe because you’re literally insane and will find some way to use it to commit a felony?”

There’s silence on the other end. It might be a guilty silence, if I was dumb enough to believe that Declan actually felt guilty about that pesky arson situation from last week. Eventually, he grumbles, “Fine. I’ll wait until I see you, and we can plan the felony together.”

“Campbell.”

“I’m not letting this go, Anderson,” Declan snaps. “What he did tonight wasn’t in the same wheelhouse as what I did. It wasn’t ‘a car for a car.’ I torched an unoccupied vehicle in a mostly empty parking lot, in the middle of the night. He almost killed you and your friend. There’s no way I’m going to let that slide.”

His words come over me in a wave of affection and adrenaline. There’s maybe some fear in there, too, but mostly, it’s an overwhelming, crushing sense of satisfaction. Declan is going to handle this. It’ll be fucked up, and probably evil, and definitely illegal, but he’s going to take care of me. Right now, that feels better than being the bigger man and letting Dave walk away without retribution could ever feel.

When I finish up and return to the living room, I find Ben and Jamie curled around each other on the couch. Ben’s legs are draped across Jamie’s lap, and the valet box is balancing open on the top of his thighs. He’s holding something in his hand and quietly asking, “These ones?”

Jamie’s head is tucked into the crook of Ben’s neck, but he manages a small nod anyway. “The kind with a swivel bar are easier to put in, but those look best when the cuffs are worn barrel-style, which I’m not particularly fond of. These are called double panels. See how they have the decoration on both sides?”

“Mm,” Ben hums. He turns the small object over in his hand, and I realize it’s a single cufflink. “Do you wear these often?”

“No, actually,” Jamie sighs. “Traditionally, one wears gold in the daytime and silver at night. You’re meant to match your metals, as well. Cufflinks, belt buckle, rings, watch. Most days, I wear this watch—” He unearths his left arm from the tangle of their bodies and pushes the buttoned cuff of his sleeve back to show the brown leather band and gold face of his watch. “That leaves me with one of these pairs of links, when I’ve got need of them. I save my favorite silver pair for formal occasions.”

“So, does that mean this is an everyday thing as well?” Ben says, setting the cufflink back in the box so that he can pick up a heavy gold signet ring instead.

“No,” I say. “He saves that for the days when it wants to make it extremely obvious that he likes men, but he’s afraid his shoes don’t spell it out.” I flop down onto the couch on Jamie’s other side. “So, just out of curiosity, what the hell are you two doing?”

“Apparently, Xanax gives James an unassailable desire to explain the differences between his cufflinks,” Ben says. “I’m showing polite interest and pretending that I have some idea what he’s talking about.”

Jamie frowns. “But you wore a tuxedo for your prom, didn’t you? You must have worn cufflinks then.”

“Didn’t have any. I just took a couple of safety pins off my backpack,” Ben says.

“Punk people disgust me,” Jamie sighs. He slips a finger into the collection of jewelry in the bottom of the valet box and begins poking through it. At first, I think he’s just trying to distract himself, but then he goes still. A beat passes. I glance over his head to meet Ben’s eyes, and he looks just as wary as I feel.

Jamie carefully extracts a ring from the rest of the jewelry. It’s a heavy platinum band with milgrain detailing around the edges, and it’s maybe one size too big to fit Jamie’s slender fingers. It slips too easily past the knuckle of his ring finger. He presses the pad of his thumb against it, gives it a small flick so that it spins against his skin.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“That,” Jamie says slowly, “is my father’s wedding band.” He dips back into the box, sifts through it for another minute, and surfaces with another ring. It’s made of the same material and in the same design as the first, but lighter, thinner. Jamie slips it onto his ring finger. It fits him well enough that its presence anchors the first ring down, keeps it from sliding off even when Jamie shakes his hand. He clears his throat and adds, “This is my mother’s.”

There… isn’t really anywhere to go from there. When I was in the hospital last spring, they took a pair of bolt cutters to Travis’s class ring to get it off my finger. I’ve spent the last month trying very hard not to think about a morgue worker down in Savannah having to do the same thing to George and Melissa’s jewelry after their crash. I’m glad I was wrong. I’m glad that the rings are intact, and that Jamie has them to hold onto. But it feels strange to see them there, a matched set of wedding rings on the hand of someone who was never supposed to wear them.

Ben swings his legs off Jamie’s lap and stands, holding the valet box out with the lid half-open. “I’ll go put this back in your room. Do you… want to put the rings back? Or would you prefer to keep them out for now?”

There isn’t any judgment in his voice. He doesn’t sound like he’d find Jamie continuing to wear his dead parents’ wedding rings any weirder than him hiding them away completely. Jamie’s gratefulness is plain on his face, and he must know that, because he ducks his head to shield his expression.

“I’ll keep them out for a minute, if that’s quite alright.”

“Of course,” Ben says. He lets the lid of the box fall shut, and then he disappears to the bedroom again.

Ten o’clock still feels too early to justify going to sleep. When Ben returns to the living room, I decide to queue up one of Jamie’s old, Tracy-and-Hepburn comfort films. The couch isn’t really big enough that three grown (or grownish, in Ben’s case) men can comfortably form a cuddle puddle on it, but we make it work. I’ve been forced to watch Desk Set somewhere in the realm of ten thousand times, so I find myself focusing on Jamie more than the film. He isn’t shaking anymore, and he gives every indication of being absorbed in the movie. When Ben wanders off to the kitchen and returns with a plate of crackers and like, seven different kinds of cheese for the three of us to share, Jamie helps himself to a few squares of pepperjack. I might even believe that he’s really okay now, if not for the fact that he keeps twisting his parents’ wedding rings around and around his finger.

When the movie ends just before midnight, Jamie is the first one off the couch. He clears his throat and declares, not looking at me or Ben, “I’m not entirely certain whether this is something that I need to clarify, but… my bed can easily fit three people in it. This would be my preferred arrangement for the night. However, if either of you is uncomfortable with that, I can make up the guest room.”

“There’s nothing to make up. I slept there two nights ago, and it’s good to go,” I say. I stand and look at Ben, who hasn’t moved. “I’m fine with sharing. And I call dibs on the right side.”

Ben barely holds back an eyeroll. “You don’t actually care what side of the bed you sleep on, and we all know it. You throw yourself on a horizontal surface and sleep wherever you land. Stop posturing. We’re all sleeping in the same room—I thought that went without saying.”

He gets up and heads down the hall to the master bedroom. Jamie and I look at each other. He’s still twisting the rings on his finger. I’ve never been great at diffusing tension like a normal person; I spend half my time getting myself worked up over nothing and having embarrassing emotional breakdowns, and the other half making stupid fucking jokes. And I know which is the more likely outcome of this particular situation.

I hold up three fingers and mouth, “Threesome.”

“Watch yourself,” Jamie warns me.

“’Bout to watch myself be half the bread on a Jamie sandwich,” I say.

“Garen.” He’s trying to chide me, but he’s also trying not to laugh. I count that as a victory. He turns to the hallway, and I crowd up behind him, looping my arms around his waist and shadowing his steps so closely that we have to move at a shuffle.

“Have you decided which one of us gets to be your big spoon?”

“You certainly seem to believe it should be you,” Jamie says. He lets his head loll back so it rests on my shoulder. I steer him down the hall, and he seems happy to be led. A soft hum of contentment escapes him. “You’re perfectly built to be a big spoon. I choose you. Ben is terrible at spooning, anyway. He sleeps facedown, which means he ends up either sprawled on top of me, or clear on the other side of the bed. Utterly pointless.”

Jamie and I reach the bedroom door at the same time that Ben is returning from one of the bathrooms, toothbrush in hand. He squeezes past us and goes right to his backpack to put the toothbrush away, and that strikes me as strange. I’d assumed he had one he kept here.Jamie extricates himself from my hold, looks down at Zooey, and sighs. “And I suppose you’d like to be fed before we all go to sleep, wouldn’t you?”

Five seconds ago, I would’ve sworn the cat was dead asleep. At Jamie’s words, Zooey cracks one luminous green eye. Jamie crouches down and attempts to pet her, but she squirms under his hand and lets out a brief warning hiss.

“Don’t you dare act like I’m the unreasonable one,” Jamie warns. “Every time I try to feed you, you pretend to be asleep, and the Fancy Feast turns crunchy in the dish. Then the moment I try to go to bed, you start clawing every bit of furniture you can get your paws on, until I get up and tend to your needs. It’s insolent.”

He tries to pry her from her bed, but she digs her claws in and refuses to budge. Jamie has to unhook each claw individually, and once he’s got her free, she turns those claws on him instead. He curses.

“This is a farce,” Ben says faintly.

“Don’t give him that much credit. A farce is supposed to be funny. This is just embarrassing,” I say. “He’s losing a fight to a kitten.”

“It is not a fight, and I am not losing,” Jamie snaps. To Zooey, he adds, “You know, I don’t actually live to serve you. Slavery went out the window when our ancestors lost the war, remember?”“Remember,” I echo, raising my eyebrows. “She’s less than a year old, and you’re asking if she remembers the Civil War. Like she was at the Battle of Gettysburg.”

Ben shoves his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “Personally, I’m a bit more concerned by the part where he refers to the Confederacy as ‘our ancestors.’”

“Well, it’s true, technically. He has like, great-great-great-great-grandparents who fought for the South,” I say, climbing gingerly onto the bed and stretching out with my hands folded behind my head. “But the Goldwyns wisely donated all their racist Confederate heirlooms to the Savannah Historical Society half a century ago. Anyway, I’m not sure Zooey qualifies as a Southerner, Jamie. She’s a Russian Blue.”

Jamie glowers at me. “She’s a Goldwyn.”

“Is she aware of that?” I ask, because Zooey is still trying to flay him. When he finally manages to bundle her up enough that she can’t scratch him anymore, she sinks her teeth into the back of his hand.

“In Soviet Russia,” I say in a heavy accent, “pussy eats you.”

Ben reaches out and strokes the back of Zooey’s neck. She seems mildly placated by this, which only annoys Jamie more. “Just take her out to the kitchen and feed her. She’ll stop attacking you if you give her what she wants. Didn’t you figure out that strategy when you met Garen years ago?”

Jamie lugs the struggling kitten out of the bedroom. The last thing we hear him say before he reaches the kitchen is a quiet, plaintive, “I’m trying, cat.”

God, that’s almost as sad as him crying in the living room was earlier.

“I hate when he talks to the cat,” Ben murmurs, scrubbing a hand over his face.

He looks exhausted, and the fact that he has just smeared his eyeliner into black circles under his eyes doesn’t help matters. I’d get off the bed and fix it for him, but I doubt he’d want me to. Sometimes, Ben’s desperation to martyr himself is so overwhelming that I think he actually gets off on it. When I first moved to Lakewood, there were nights when Alex would throw parties and end up getting too drunk to handle himself. Ben would clean up the house, put out the recycling, and tuck Al into bed with this horrible tenderness that was difficult to watch. When he came to visit me at the Lakewood Rehabilitation Center last summer, he would stare at me from across the table in the visiting room, his eyes wide with a wild hunger to fix everything that was wrong in me.

Right now, his desire to make things right for Jamie is radiating off of him with such intensity that it feels almost erotic. His gaze drifts sideways from the doorway and settles on me like he can hear my thoughts. For a long moment, neither of us speaks.

Finally, he says, “Couldn’t you have delayed your traumatizing car wreck for another month or two? I’d probably have a better idea of how to provide emotional support if we’d been together for longer than a week.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You guys have been together for months,” I say.

“Not officially.”

“Fuck officially. You already know how to be there for him. You’ve done it before, the weekend after he got back from Savannah. We came to New Haven, and I went out with Travis, Stohler, and Alex. You and Jamie stayed at your apartment, and he was upset. You helped him then.”Ben leans back against the edge of Jamie’s dresser. It’s a casual pose, but his eyes are sharply focused on me when he says, “All I did was distract him with sex.”

There. It’s finally out on the table now: the easiest way to relax Jamie when he’s in one of his anxious spirals, the surest way to remind him that people are there for him. At the very least, it’s nice to know that Ben and I are on the same page.

“Sometimes a distraction is all he needs,” I say. “You said it earlier—Jamie’s strong. He doesn’t need a savior. He just needs a little bit of help getting through bad nights.”

Ben pulls himself up onto the dresser and crosses his legs under him, the way a little kid sits when he’s waiting to hear a story. “Okay,” he says, “and if I’m going to be distracting him through a bad night, where does that leave you? Because I don’t… I don’t mean to insult you, G, but we both know you’re not going to take one for the team and offer to go sleep in the guest room. And even if you were, James has made it clear that he doesn’t want to be separated from you tonight.”Jamie doesn’t want to be separated from me on any night, I want to say. That’s the foundation of our friendship: unwavering love and affection, wrapped up in a heavy blanket of codependency. If I were speaking to almost anyone else on the planet—any of the other guys or girls who Jamie has dated in the past—I’d probably go off on them. I’d let them feel dismissed and rejected, I’d make them storm out, and I’d take Jamie to bed and keep him safe all on my own. But this is Ben I’m talking to, and somehow, that changes things. I’m just not sure if that’s because of what he means to me, or because of what I think he might mean to Jamie.

“The thing that you need to understand,” I say, choosing my words as precisely as I know how, “is that I’m not going anywhere. And I mean that in, you know, a grander sense than just tonight. Jamie and I date other people, and we sleep with other people, and we love other people, but our friendship is… the only thing that we’ll always be sure of. The only thing we both know is permanent. And if he needs me to be with him tonight, I will be.”

Ben cocks his head to the side, a slight furrow forming in his brow. “Do you honestly believe that any of this is news to me? I know how you two are with each other. I’ve always known. I’m still here.”

“I’m the love of his life,” I say. I don’t care that it probably sounds trite; I know that it isn’t. It’s true, and it’s important, and it’s something Ben needs to take seriously.

And I’m guessing he doesn’t, because the corner of his mouth twitches, and he looks away. “You say that every time I get a new boyfriend.”“Maybe you should quit trying to make boyfriends out of guys I fucked first.”

“Maybe you should quit intentionally interfering with my relationships so that I have no choice but to move on with other guys you’ve dated,” Ben says. “If you ruin things between me and James, I’m coming after your dead-eyed ginger.”

Ben slowly raises his middle finger and wipes at the black smudge under his bottom lashes. I don’t have any makeup to clean up, so I just give him the finger, which is of course when Jamie returns, cat-free and frowning.

“I left for five minutes, and you two are already gesturing rudely at one another?” he says.

“The fucking gall of you saying that to me,” I say, stretching my arms out to the side so that I’m taking up the whole bed, “when your grand romance began as a hatefuck on the floor.”

Jamie steps into his enormous walk-in closet to undress for bed. “Our grand romance, as you’ve so revoltingly termed it, has mostly continued as hatefucking on the floor. Or on tables. In cars. Against walls.”

“Against the living room window, as of yesterday,” Ben says.

“You look handsome with your new haircut. I wanted to show you off,” Jamie says. He leans out of the closet just far enough to make a long moment of steady eye contact with Ben, whose face is little redder than it was a moment ago.

I stretch my arms out so I’m spread across the whole duvet. “You two ever make it to a bed?”

“Occasionally,” James says.

Wary of the twinge that spikes up my spine anytime I move too abruptly, I shift carefully onto the right side of the bed and give him the hey-best-buddy-I’m-into-it-if-you-are look that has been getting him out of his clothes for four years now. “Well, if that’s the direction you wanna take things, then by all means, don’t let me stop you.”

Jamie shakes his head, smiling slightly, and disappears into the closet to finish undressing. I turn my attention to Ben instead. He’s still sitting on the dresser, still fully clothed. I hold out a hand to him and say, “You gonna come over here, or what?”

“In a minute,” he says. He pulls the sleeves of his hoodie down over his hands and blinks at the cuffs. He looks… nervous. Which is several different kinds of weird. He’s Jamie’s boyfriend, and this is at least the third weekend he has stayed here. He knows his way around the bed. He knows his way around the guys who are going to be sharing it with him. He just has to wriggle his way out of those skinny jeans and get horizontal.

James steps out of the closet wearing a pair of striped pajama pants and no shirt. He seems clueless to whatever internal crisis Ben is having, and excuses himself to the bathroom to finish getting ready for sleep.

“You okay?” I say to Ben the moment we’re alone again.

He slips off the edge of the dresser and begins to undress. It’s a silent and aborted process; he peels himself out of his jeans and shoves them into his backpack, unzips his hoodie and starts to remove it. He pauses. Looks at me. Straightens the hoodie, zips it back up, and climbs into the bed with a yawning gap on the mattress between us and not a single word spoken.

Which doesn’t really work for me.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

He gives me a curious look. “Excuse me?”

My heartbeat feels too quick. I want to be there for Jamie, even if it means inviting myself into his apartment, his bed, his relationship. But I don’t want Ben to hate me for it. I swallow. “You don’t have to lie down that far away.”

“I assumed James would sleep in the middle.”

“He will, but you’re just… you’re far away. And you’re still mostly dressed.” I reach for his hoodie and tug it from his shoulder. “It’s almost May, dude, you’re going to be too warm to sleep, if you keep this—”

“Garen, don’t,” Ben says sharply. He tries to pull away from me, but I already have a good grip on the sweatshirt, and I manage to yank it down so his wrists are tangled up in the cuffs, drawn taut behind his back. It’s the kind of pose he’d probably enjoy being fucked in. I might make an offer, if exposing his arms hadn’t revealed something that makes me feel like I’m going to vomit.

I don’t know that I could count all of Ben’s scars, even if he stayed still long enough for me to try. The worst of them overlap and intersect, like he tried crosshatching his skin with a razor. In certain spots, it’s hard to tell if I’m looking at several thin scars that bump right up against each other, or one fat scar where he went too deep. The one that landed him in the urgent care clinic last October is the ugliest, but it’s not the newest. Halfway between his shoulder and elbow, there are two neat slices on the pale skin of his left arm. They are still very much in the cut stage, barely healed enough to qualify as scabs and still weeks away from being scars. Can’t be more than three days old. If Ben’s t-shirt was half a size bigger, his sleeve would cover the marks, and he’d be fine. Dazedly, I wonder how he managed to keep his shirt on all weekend, considering most of Jamie’s boyfriends and girlfriends are surprised if they get to stay dressed for more than an hour at a time.

“Ben,” I say softly, “Ben, babe, what the fuck.”

He shakes his head and makes a muffled sound, halfway between a hum and a groan. I’m too stunned to stop him from squirming out of my grasp and burrowing into the blankets. It really is warm in the room, but that doesn’t stop him from pulling the covers up to his neck, pulling the hood of his sweatshirt up over his head, and turning his back to me. “Don’t. Please.”

I glance at the doorway, but Jamie’s still fucking around in the bathroom. I scoot closer to Ben and say, trying so fucking hard to stay calm, “You stopped doing that last fall, though. Didn’t you? I took your… your arsenal out of your apartment after you got your stitches. You were supposed to stop.”

“I did,” Ben says flatly. “At least, I tried. For six goddamn months, I tried every single day. I want—” He breaks off, and I can hear him swallowing, like the words are caught in his throat. His shoulders shift, his whole body contorts as he forces the words out of his mouth. “I wanted to get better. I swear. But this—this past week has been too much. Fighting with Alex, my parents finding out about James, trying to prepared for my final exams next week. I couldn’t. I was fucking up. I fucked up. I needed it, and I’m not—it’s not like I’m going back to it. Thursday was just a bad night, and I had to do something.”

This is the second weekend in a row that I’ve listened to him get tangled in his words, and it makes me ache that his own mouth seems to rebel against him when he’s at his most nervous and vulnerable. If I had to deal with that every time I fucked up, every time I relapsed, every time I wanted to relapse, I don’t know what I’d do. I don’t know what to do now. I worm my way closer under the blankets and slip an arm around his waist. He doesn’t try to get away from me; if the way he clutches at my wrist is any indication, he’s grateful for the embrace.

Across the hall, the bathroom faucet shuts off. Ben’s back vibrates as a breath shudders through him. “Can we please not talk about this anymore? I don’t want James to know. This isn’t the night for it. Please.”

I press my lips to the back of Ben’s neck, hoping the gentleness of the gesture will balance out the harshness of the words I have to say to him. “I’m not going to blurt it out the second he gets back, but if he asks me outright if you’re still hurting yourself, I’m telling him the truth. I won’t ever lie to Jamie. Not even for you.”

“Hey, no. Don’t be sorry. We’re going to talk about it later, when it’s just us. I’ll call you tomorrow night, or I’ll come see you next weekend after therapy, and we’ll talk. It’ll be okay.”

Like I have any fucking clue what qualifies as okay. To my surprise, Ben is either desperate or suddenly stupid enough to take my word for it. He squeezes my wrist and echoes, "Okay."

I hear movement in the doorway, but it feels right to focus on Ben for a moment longer. He doesn't fight me as I carefully dig us out of the blankets, and his muscles begin to gradually unknot under my touch when I start rubbing small, slow circles over his ribs, like I'm trying to warm the bird tattooed on his side. When I look over my shoulder, Jamie is standing very still in the doorway. He has traded his contacts for his eyeglasses, and his face is freshly scrubbed and—from the really goddamn metrosexual look of it—moisturized. He's watching us with his head cocked ever so slightly to the side, giving him a striking resemblance to Omelette.

Wordlessly, I return to the right side of the bed, leaving more than enough space for him to crawl between me and Ben. He does it gracefully, of course. Once the bedside lamp has been turned off and all three of us are tucked under the blankets, there's a semi-pathetic few minutes of fumbling as we try to find positions that work for all of us. As much as I want to fulfill Jamie's earlier request for me to be his big spoon, my spine objects to the give in his mattress, and I have to lie flat on my back to find anything even approaching comfort. Jamie stretches out against my side, one of his legs thrown across mine and his head pillowed over my heart, and Ben curls up behind him. The two of them are skinny enough that I can hold them both close with one outstretched arm. Ben’s arm is draped over Jamie’s waist, and their joined hands are resting on my stomach, rising and falling with each breath I take.

I try to shut up and go to sleep. Really, I do. But it doesn’t work. It isn’t right, it isn’t what’s needed, and maybe a minute of silence wanes on before I say, still looking up at the ceiling and not entirely sure who I’m talking to, “Kiss me.”

A hand twitches on my stomach, but I can’t tell whose it is. I’m guessing Jamie, since he’s the one who says, “Pardon?”

“If you plan to sleep with a man on each side, the least you can do is kiss us both goodnight.” I shrug the shoulder that is pinned under Jamie’s weight. “I’ll even let Ben go first, ‘cause I’m nice like that.”

Jamie’s breath flutters across my throat. I think he’s trying to seem huffy and put-upon, but he doesn’t really have time to muster the attitude. Without saying a word, Ben pushes himself up on one hand and leans over to lay a soft, lingering kiss at the very edge of Jamie’s mouth. Jamie remains perfectly still, even after Ben has flopped back onto the mattress. The angle isn’t great—for kissing, or for my injured neck. I end up cupping a hand over Jamie’s jaw and steering his face up so that our mouths can meet without me having to move too much. Like Ben, I draw the kiss out longer than I think Jamie is prepared for. Unlike Ben, I decide that a kiss is really only worth the effort if you slip in a little tongue.

Jamie ducks his head to break the kiss and chides me, “Garen. Behave yourself.”

“I don’t want to,” I say. “Ben doesn’t want me to, either.”

There’s a moment where Jamie waits for Ben to voice an objection. It doesn’t happen. Jamie glances over his shoulder at his lover, and I take the opportunity to sneak close enough to kiss his perfect, sculpted cheekbone.

“You have no idea what Ben wants,” he tells me.

I’ve been giving Ben McCutcheon what he wants since before Jamie even knew he existed. That seems like the type of observation that will get me shoved out of the bed and onto the floor. Instead of voicing it, I let my hand drift from his face to his chest so that I can trace lazy, aimless designs over his skin with the tips of my fingers. “Sure, I do. We talked about it while you were feeding Zooey. Didn’t we, Ben?”

“You didn’t talk about a damn thing, and you know it,” Jamie says. His free hand—the one that isn’t knotted up with Ben’s—finds its way to my waist under the blankets and gives me a good, solid pinch. “You’re just trying to get me in trouble. Which isn’t particularly surprising in and of itself, but one might expect you to have the decency to wait until my boyfriend’s out of the room before you start trying to sweet-talk me into cheating on him.”

“Cheating would imply that it was done without my knowledge or consent,” Ben says. He props himself up on one elbow so that he can see both of us, not just Jamie. “He wasn’t kidding when he told you that we talked about it.”

Jamie rolls onto his back, the better to look directly at Ben. I’m not sure what he’s searching for in Ben’s eyes, and I’m not sure if he finds it. Finally, he says, “And?”

“You can kiss him the way you want to kiss him. You don’t have to stop yourself because of me,” Ben says. His eyes flicker from Jamie’s eyes to his mouth.

Jamie catches the glance and leans in for a kiss, but Ben shakes his head. He fits his hand against Jamie’s throat—palm covering his Adam’s apple and fingers at the hinge of his jaw—and gently turns his face towards me. I could count his eyelashes, if I wanted to. I could steal the breath from his lungs. Ben nudges Jamie onto his side again, and the moment the back of Jamie’s neck is exposed, Ben leans in to fit his teeth against the spot that never fails to earn a moan.

This time, I don’t give him the benefit of any hesitation. A broken sound falls from Jamie’s lips, and I swallow it. One of his legs is draped over mine, and he’s pressed up against my side, but he still feels too far away. When I reach for him, I overestimate the distance and end up with my hand on Ben’s hip instead. That works just as well—I dig my fingertips into his skin, the fabric of his boxers, whatever I happen to be touching, and drag him as close as possible. Jamie makes another desperate noise into my mouth, and I wonder if Ben is hard against him.Something nudges my ribs. It takes me a moment to grasp that it’s their joined hands, still wedged between Jamie’s body and mine. I untangle Ben’s hand and guide it to the front of Jamie’s pajama pants. Obediently, he slips his hand inside, but he doesn’t get more than a few strokes in before Jamie grabs his wrist.

“Wait, wait,” Jamie groans. “Turn on the light. I need to see both of you, I need to say something first.”

I throw a hand out and blindly grope my way over the nightstand until I reach the lamp switch. Light floods the room, and I shield my eyes. Jamie is still squished between me and Ben, but he’s holding both of us at bay as best he can.

“This can’t only be about me. I won’t have that,” he says. “I appreciate that you believe I’ve had a bad night, and that you want to make me feel better about it. I’m beholden to you both. But I would rather stop this now than trap either of you into doing something that makes you uncomfortable.”

The disclaimer isn’t even for me. He knows I’m with him, no matter what we’re getting ourselves into. Ben’s the one whose reaction is something to be wary of. For once, it feels like a good idea to actually keep my mouth shut for five seconds and wait for this to play out naturally.

Ben meets Jamie’s gaze dead-on. “It isn’t only about you. It isn’t something only you want.”

“Prove it,” Jamie demands.

Ben takes his sweet time deciding what he’s going to do next. When he finally moves, it’s to grip Jamie’s hips and push him up and over so he’s spread across my lap, his knees tucked on either side of my hips. I only have a few seconds to stare up at my best friend, trying to reassure him of my love without having to say it aloud, before Ben moves into Jamie’s vacated place at my side. One of us moves in for a kiss, and the other deepens it, but it happens so quickly that I’m not sure which one I am.

It should feel weird, kissing my best friend’s boyfriend right there in front of him. Not because it’s unfamiliar—I kiss Ben a lot. We kiss as a greeting, we kiss as a goodbye, we kiss whenever one of us thinks the other must need it. But it’s been months since we kissed in a way that felt sexual. The fact that it’s happening in Jamie’s bed, with him on top of me, is probably the kind of thing that would make my therapist want to roll her eyes at me.

I don’t give a shit.

It feels incredible to be here in this moment, to be able to put on the kind of display that has Jamie’s thighs tightening their grip at my hips. My dick is hardening in my pants, and if Jamie doesn’t notice it at first, I’m guessing he becomes pretty aware of it when I shift under him so that my hard-on grinds against his ass. Ben isn’t unaffected by this, either. After only a minute of making out, his breathing is shaky. By the time we get to the second minute, it’s practically a rattle. When I open my eyes and lean back a little, it’s immediately apparent why.One of Jamie’s hands is curled like a collar over Ben’s neck, with the pad of his thumb digging directly into Ben’s windpipe. A delicate flush is creeping up into Ben’s face, but I’d have to flip a coin to say whether that’s because he’s choking to death or because he’s turned on. He looks so fucking blissed out right now. I don’t think he even realizes that I’ve stopped kissing him.

“If you sex-murder your boyfriend, we’re screwed,” I tell Jamie. “At least six people know I’m spending the night here, so I can’t help you fake an alibi. And your building has really good security, so I’m not sure how we’d dispose of the body without getting caught.”

Sure enough, Ben can only take another ten-ish seconds of asphyxiation before he taps two trembling fingers against Jamie’s forearm. Jamie releases him immediately, and Ben’s whole body rides out a shudder when the air rushes back to his lungs. Jamie steadies him with one hand spread wide over his stomach.

“Good?” he inquires.

“Fantastic,” Ben breathes. “Come here. Get down here, now.”

When they lunge towards each other, it’s like watching the start of a dog fight. They’re locked together, Jamie trying to drag Ben upright, Ben trying to yank Jamie down on top of him. Ben digs his nails into Jamie’s bare back, and Jamie sinks his teeth into Ben’s lip hard enough that I’m surprised he doesn’t draw blood. They look like they could use some space, but when I sit up to try to move Jamie the rest of the way off my lap, he throws an arm around my shoulders and draws me in. I kiss his jaw, his neck, his collarbone, anything I can reach. When I run out of convenient territory, I wrestle him off of me and onto the mattress. Ben and I fall over his body like feasting animals, stripping him of what little clothing he has on so that we can devour him. Ben is content to stay up north, taking his turn with all the places I’ve just finished mouthing at. I start to head south, but veer off-course when I realize that there’s no way I’ll be able to do everything I want to do to Jamie without getting provisions first.

The last time I fucked Jamie was in October. Back then, he kept condoms, lube, and a couple of not-legally-sold-in-Alabama toys in his nightstand drawer. Now, he has lube, toys, a pair of soft leather wrist cuffs with shining steel hardware, and a set of banjo picks. No condoms, though, which simplifies things; I’m not going to fuck anybody raw, and if they’re comfortable enough in their sexual exclusivity to forgo condoms, then I’m guessing that the offer to go bare with one of them isn’t really on the table anyway.

After stopping to strip off my t-shirt, I pick up one of the banjo picks, slide it onto my fingertip, and wiggle it at Jamie. “If you decided to take up an instrument to impress your two favorite musical geniuses, you probably should’ve picked a less Mumford and Sons instrument to play.”

Jamie’s mouth twists into a smirk. “Those aren’t for that type of playing. I can show you, if you’d like.”

He holds out a hand. I scoop the remaining picks out of the drawer and drop them on his waiting palm. He slips them onto his fingertips with the points curved inward like claws, then turns his attention to Ben and crooks one glittering finger. Wordlessly, Ben crawls further up the mattress until he’s kneeling at Jamie’s side. Jamie runs his knuckles up Ben’s thigh, up the leg of his boxers, all the way up to his hip. I can see some sort of movement under Ben’s boxers; Jamie is either rubbing his hip or stroking him off. For a moment, they just look at each other. Suddenly, Jamie rakes the points of the banjo picks back down the length of Ben’s thigh, leaving four glowing red scratches from hip to knee. Ben lurches forward, bracing his hands flat on the mattress and squeezing his eyes shut, forcing out a choked, “Jesus Christ.”

“You guys are so fucking weird,” I whisper, even though my rock-solid hard-on doesn’t seem to be on the same page about that.

“You have no idea,” Jamie says. His hand disappears back up the leg of Ben’s boxers, but this time, he’s definitely jerking him off. With the hand wearing the banjo picks. Points and all.

I shake my head and return to the nightstand for the lube, then move down to set myself up between Jamie’s slightly parted legs. I don’t doubt that they’re both insanely into the sadomasochism thing they’re playing with now, but when I get my mouth on Jamie’s dick, there’s no competition for his attention.

“Oh,” Jamie breathes. It’s all he seems able to get out. Good, I think to myself, viciously satisfied. That’s exactly how I want him to feel tonight—stunned, and overwhelmed, and completely possessed by sensation. An idea flickers to life in the back of my mind. I grab Ben by the wrist and drag him down to join me between Jamie’s legs. His shoulder fits snugly under mine, and once he’s pinned there, he realizes what I’m going for and tries to squirm even closer.

The moment Jamie gets my mouth on his cock, my hand on his balls, and Ben’s tongue on his hole, he lets out a groan that falls just shy of a shout. I’m perversely thrilled by the thought of him getting loud enough to have the neighbors call down to the concierge to complain. He’s swearing, he’s shaking, he’s squirming around way too fucking much to make this easy on us. Ben catches one of his thrashing legs, but I’m the one who has to get a good grip on that leg and shove it up and out of the way so Ben can keep going.

One of Jamie’s hands finds its way to the back of my head. A shittier friend would push my head down, force me to take his dick deeper into my throat, but Jamie apparently just wants to caress me. My hair is too short for him to grab onto, so he settles for clumsily stroking the back of my skull. Next to me—beneath me?—Ben makes a shattered, grateful noise. Either he’s getting the same petting treatment, or he likes eating ass more than I could ever have anticipated.

I grope around in the sheets until I find the abandoned bottle of lubricant and thrust it towards Ben. I think I might accidentally hit him in the neck with it, but that’s so not my fault. We’re in very close quarters right now, and it’s not like it matters—he takes the bottle from me, and I can hear the top cracking open, so we’re on our way. A few seconds later, Ben’s shoulder digs into my sternum as he shifts to get his fingers inside his boyfriend. Jamie’s hips buck upward, almost choking me. His cursing ratchets up a few dozen levels.

“Oh, fucking hell. Shit, you—fuck, fuck, fuck me. More.”

I pull off, kiss the razor edge of Jamie’s jutting hipbone, and say, “Come on, now. Is that how a gentleman talks?”

“This is the only time in our lives when you will ever hear me say this, so I’d encourage you to savor the moment,” Jamie says, all in a rush, “but I don’t give a damn about being a gentleman right now. Jesus, McCutcheon. Are you going to make me beg for it?”

Ben is still fucking him slowly with two fingers, mouthing at the skin of Jamie’s inner thigh. I lean in to nuzzle my nose against his hair and whisper, “You should make him beg for it.”

Jamie digs his heel into my ribcage. “You’re supposed to be on my side, you traitor.”

“I’m always on your side,” I say, finding his hand in the sheets. He’s still wearing the banjo picks on his fingers, and when he squeezes back, I can feel the silver points digging into the back of my hand. “We’ve got you, Jamie. You’re all ours tonight. And we’re going to be so fucking good to you.”

I take him in my mouth again, and he seems as into it as he’s ever been, but he only lets it go on for a minute or so before he gets restless.

“Fuck me,” Jamie says again. His free hand has got a white-knuckled grip on the bedsheets, and he seems unable to stop his hips from twitching closer to us every time one of us moves away. “Please, fuck me, I need you—”

Ben almost headbutts me as he surfaces from between Jamie’s legs. He tries to shake his hair off his face, but it falls back in front of his eyes almost immediately. “When you have two people going down on you at once, I think you have to be a bit more specific with your pronouns.”

“You,” Jamie repeats. He grabs a fistful of Ben’s hair and yanks. If he was trying to bring his lover up for a kiss, it’s an unsuccessful move; Ben just shudders and arches into me, resisting the pull as much as he can without having his hair torn out at the roots.It’s been a while since I’ve slept with Ben, and I’d forgotten how utterly useless he gets under the right combination of pain and arousal. Truth is, I’m not sure I’ve ever been patient enough for the kind of thing he and Jamie have going on. I can make magic with Ben’s masochism, sure, but it usually ends up being a prelude to something better. I’ll fuck him up, I’ll get him going, but there’s a point where the whole S&M thing should segue into actual fucking, and I don’t think I’m necessarily on the same page as Ben is about when that point is. He could happily nut himself from half an hour of hair-pulling and a few well-placed bites; I’d still want more.

Six months ago, I would’ve sworn Jamie agreed with me. Right now, he seems inclined to let Ben writhe under his hands, without any indication that the fucking he demanded a minute ago will actually happen anytime soon. I find myself reminded of New Year’s Eve and the almost-but-not-quite-a-threesome in the back of the cab. I’d been right there, and I’d been willing, but Jamie had purred something about delayed gratification, and Ben had been putty in Jamie’s beautiful, slim-fingered hands. I didn’t get it then. I don’t get it now. And tonight, Jamie didn’t fucking ask for delayed gratification. He asked to get fucked, and if that’s what he wants—what he needs from us, then it’s what we’re going to give him.

I lean in so that my mouth is touching Ben’s ear and my teeth are grazing his skin with every word. “He said he wants you to fuck him. Quit dicking around down here and do it, before someone else pushes you out of the way and does it for you.”

“It should be you anyway. You’re better in bed than I am,” Ben blurts out.

“Sweet, merciful fucking Christ, McCutcheon, there is a place and a time for your fits of self-doubt,” Jamie spits out. “And neither ‘my bed,’ nor ‘when I’m asking to be fucked’ qualify as acceptable answers.”

“Besides, it can’t be me. There aren’t any condoms,” I point out.

Ben blinks around at me. “There aren’t?”

“Of course there aren’t,” Jamie says. “I don’t use them with you, so why would I keep a supply of them here?”

“I don’t know,” Ben mumbles.

Wrong fucking answer, in my opinion. He might as well come out and say, I assumed you were cheating on me all week while I’m in Connecticut. I’m reaching for his shoulder so I can shove his ungrateful, untrusting ass off the edge of the bed, but Jamie just continues to pull at Ben’s hair until the smaller man lets himself be drawn up to eye level.

“You're the only person I let have me. I didn’t intend for that to change tonight.” He pulls the neck of Ben’s t-shirt roughly aside and lifts his head to bite down hard on Ben’s exposed shoulder. Sounding like a disapproving teacher, he adds, “You should know that already, you shit.”

“Stop biting me, asshole,” Ben says, squirming half-heartedly.

“Stop pretending that you don’t love being bitten,” Jamie retorts.Stop bitching at each other so we can get to the fucking, I want to say. It’s not really my party, though. It’s Jamie’s, and if he wants to supplement his dicking down with a heavy dose of verbal foreplay, that’s his call. I don’t relish the idea of having to lie on my side to stay engaged with them while they fuck. My back is still sore, and the muscles in my neck feel like they might be starting to seize up from bobbing on Jamie’s dick for so long. I sprawl out on my back, letting my whole body melt into the mattress, and wait for Jamie to do exactly what I want. He knows every atom of me; I don’t need to actually tell him what to do. He nudges Ben off him again and, after pausing just long enough to drag my sweatpants down to my ankles so I can kick them off, he gets a leg over my lap and stretches out over me, his elbows braced above my shoulders on the bed.

“Hello there,” I say softly.

“Hi,” he says. “Fancy meeting you here.”

My fingers fit perfectly into the notches of his ribcage. I don’t want to squeeze him too much, but I want him to feel the weight of me. I want him to know I’m here. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Ben removing his own boxers and reaching for the lube again. He kneels behind Jamie, out of my line of sight completely now. With a little bit of stretching, I can reach back and meet his fingers as he spreads more of the lube on Jamie’s hole. We each get one finger in him, not really managing to find the same pace. Jamie doesn’t seem to give a fuck about that, though. He sighs against my jaw.

“Want him?” I prompt. Jamie nods. I withdraw my hand.

There’s a lengthy pause in which Jamie waits to feel Ben pressing into him, and I wait to feel Jamie’s reaction, since I still can’t actually see Ben from this angle. Nothing happens.

“You alive back there?” I ask.

“I can’t,” Ben says.

Shit. Jamie drops his head so it hangs low between his shoulders; I think he’s trying to hide his disappointment from me, but I swear I can feel it pulsing under his skin.

“Can’t what?” I bite out, a little rougher than I mean to. “Can’t fuck him if I’m watching? Can’t have a threesome, period?”

“Reach.”

Jamie lifts his head again so that we can blink at each other. I think we’re both trying to figure out if we actually heard Ben correctly. Jamie clears his throat, turns his head, and very politely says over his shoulder, “Pardon?”

Ben sighs and sits back on his heels, shifting enough that I can see him again. He looks irritated and more than a little embarrassed. “I can’t—God, I hate you both. I can’t reach. Not in this position. James, your legs are too fucking long, and your ass is too high for me to—stop laughing right now.”

James doesn’t stop. Or can’t stop. I have to smother his face against my neck so they can hear me say, “When I was a kid, our neighbors on one side had this Yorkie that knocked up the Newfoundland that lived with the neighbors on our other side”—Jamie may or may not be choking to death on his own laughter—“and I was always so curious how that happened, but my dad said it would’ve been impolite to ask. It’s been ten years, but I won’t lie to you guys, I’m pretty excited to finally find out tonight.”

Jamie surfaces from my suffocating grip and rolls off me to lie back on the bed next to me. He’s not laughing anymore, but his blinding smile makes it kind of obvious that he’s barely past the hilarity. “No, you aren’t. You’re staying right here with me.”

“I’m not. I hate you,” Ben repeats. Even as he says it, he shifts across the mattress on hands and knees to settle himself between Jamie’s thighs.

“You don’t hate me. Not in the least,” Jamie says. He grips the front of Ben’s shirt and yanks him down so their bodies are flush together. “Could you really not reach? Or were you just saying that to make me laugh?”

“It’s going to be so sad when Ben breaks up with you in like, five minutes,” I whisper.

“I don’t need to break up with him,” Ben says. “I just need to shut him the fuck up for five minutes, and we’ll be fine.”

Jamie raises an eyebrow. “Five minutes? Is that all you intend to take? Good Lord, maybe I should have asked Garen to fuck me inst—”

The rest of the word and any others that he planned to let out after that are lost. I have taken the liberty of crawling behind Ben so that I can reach under him, between their tangled legs, and push the head of his cock inside of Jamie. I don’t really trust Ben to actually get his shit together and give Jamie the kind of fucking he deserves. So, just to be on the safe side, I plaster myself against Ben’s back and lean my full weight on him. A hundred and eighty pounds of pressure is enough to have him all the way inside before either of them is fully caught up to what I’m doing. Jamie curses and clamps his thighs around Ben’s hips, my hips. He can’t help but embrace both of us in this position, and I’m so fucking grateful to be included, to be part of this.

“You guys are so slow,” I murmur against the back of Ben’s neck. “No wonder it took you guys almost five months to go on a date.”

“This arguing is going to be the death of me,” Jamie groans. He clenches the hood of Ben’s sweatshirt in his fist. “Why are you still wearing this? We’re in bed, and you’re dressed. Get this off. Get it off and fuck me harder.”

Ben doesn’t get the sweatshirt off. He barely even tries. Jamie gets the fabric rucked up under Ben’s arms, but Ben won’t lift his hands from where they’re braced on the bed long enough to let the shirt come all the way off. I’m not sure if it’s because he’s too focused, or if he’s still calculating how to keep the cuts on his arm hidden from Jamie. I wrap my arms around him and scratch my nails through the coarse, dark hair that trails over his chest and down his stomach. He shivers, but that’s the only reaction I can get out of him—which is when it hits me that I’ve lost his attention completely. It’s impossible for me to tell from where I’m sitting, but I’d bet anything that he can’t take his eyes off Jamie’s face. He’s fucking him—I don’t wanna say slowly, but definitely thoroughly. His thrusts are deep and hard; when he shifts his weight to one hand so he can stroke Jamie’s throat and chest with the other, his touch is nothing short of worshipful.

I’m not really needed on this end of things. Even I’m not so self-absorbed that this escapes me. I leave Ben to his own devices and stretch out at Jamie’s side. He twists to kiss me, but that only lasts a couple of seconds before he breaks it off with a gasp. I glance up again. Jamie’s vague groping has made its way up to Ben’s mouth, and Ben is sucking Jamie’s fingers as desperately and whorishly as he’d suck a cock. The two platinum wedding bands gleam brightly against the lush, red slash of Ben’s mouth.

I can’t really… watch the two of them together. At first, it’s just too weird—Ben topping anyone, the incongruity of their sizes, the bizarreness of them even wanting to be with each other after all the months of bickering I had to put up with last year. But even after I adjust to that, it’s hard to watch them because of how they fuck.

There’s tender violence in the way they touch each other. And I’m not prepared for it. At all. They seem incapable of going more than two minutes without someone getting choked or having their hair yanked or being bitten or being scratched. At one point, when I have my face buried against Jamie’s shoulder under the guise of giving him a hickey, I hear something that sounds unmistakably like a slap. I don’t know who gets hit. I don’t know where they get hit. I don’t know how hard. I don’t want to know.

Someone touches my side, and I flinch. When the hand moves from my ribs to my stomach, then down to my dick, I open my eyes. Jamie is stroking me off. I reach for him, too, and suddenly it’s like we’re back in the Patton dorms together. Even before we started going all-in on our sex lives, we were always eager to get each other off like this. If I close my eyes, I can almost pretend that it’s just the two of us. Ben’s here, but he doesn’t have to be. In my head, Jamie and I can be alone in our Whitman Hall dorm. We can both be single, devoted only to each other, without boyfriends or other fuck buddies or shitty exes. We can be fifteen again, and I can have a whole body that Dave Walczyk never touched.

“Love you,” I say quietly.

“I love you, too,” Jamie tells me.

For a moment, there’s silence, except for the sound of skin moving against skin. I’m not going to lie, it’s a little awkward. I fill in the blank in my head--and I also love you, Ben. Why, thanks, James, I love you, too. It doesn’t happen. I glance up at Ben, but he doesn’t look like he feels hurt or rejected, which is fantastic. This bed only has room for one person with a crippling fear of abandonment, and there’s a nice, thick file in my shrink’s office that explains why that one person is me.

Jamie looks from my face to my dick, to Ben’s face, to my dick again. He makes a considering noise in his throat, then turns his attention back to Ben and declares, “I would very much appreciate an opportunity to watch you suck Garen’s cock. Is that something you’d be amenable to?”

Ben raises his eyebrows and nods to where their bodies are joined together. “You want me to stop?”

Jamie’s bed is as pissy about me standing on it as Jamie himself is. The mattress shifts like rolling seas under me. It’s tough to get a good footing, and once I’m fully upright, I have to throw a hand up against the ceiling to steady myself. The noise Jamie makes is fucking tortured. “You’ll leave fingerprints. I’m going to have to clean the ceiling.”

“Or you’re going to have to see a psychiatrist,” I suggest.

“This was more erotic in your head, wasn’t it?” Ben says.

Jamie shoves a hand up the front of Ben’s shirt and pinches his nipple until he gasps. “In my head, you were fucking listening to me and going down on Garen like I asked you to.”

Ben opens his mouth to argue. I cup a hand over the back of his head and steer him to my crotch instead. It is admittedly not one of my classier moves, but it makes Ben choke a little, and that makes Jamie laugh-slash-moan, which is probably my favorite sound in the world. Besides, I feel like I’m part of this in a way I wasn’t when I was lying next to them. I’m in Ben, Ben’s in Jamie, Jamie curls a hand around my ankle to keep me stable. We’re connected, all three of us, and that’s so much more satisfying to me than the sex part of it. When my orgasm eventually happens, I barely acknowledge the pleasure of it. I yank Ben off me by the hair and finish myself off with my hand. My come lands in sloppy stripes on his hoodie and his beard. That’s something I’d normally be amused by, but right now, my climax feels like nothing more than a box I had to check off.

I drop to my knees and push Ben as far back onto his heels as he can go without having to pull out of Jamie, whose cock I take into my mouth again. The first few bobs probably aren’t great; I’m busy searching the sheets for the bottle of lube so I can squirt some onto my fingers and reach around to Ben’s ass. He swears in a fantastically sacrilegious way when I get my fingers in him, and he fucks up the flow of everything when I find his prostate. His thrusts are wild, with no rhythm whatsoever. We’re all lucky I don’t have a gag reflex, ‘cause Jamie’s cock gets shoved all the way to the back of my throat at least three times. This isn’t even sex anymore. It’s bodily chaos.

With a faceful of cock, I can’t exactly check, but I know that Ben must be making that face, that unbearably hot, completely silent, rapturous expression, like he’s seeing God every time he gets off. Jamie must appreciate that face as much as I always have, because he digs his fingertips into the meat of my shoulder and gives an uncharacteristically graceless grunt and floods my mouth not long after.

It takes a while for all of us to come down. Jamie and I are sprawled out, side-by-side, but there isn’t any space for Ben to lie down next to Jamie, so he stays on his knees.

I could probably fall asleep like this, but right as I feel myself starting to drift, Jamie says, “I should go get cleaned up before bed.”

“You can clean up in the morning,” I argue.

He makes a face. “This isn’t about me being particular, Garen. This is about me not wanting to go to sleep with Benjamin’s come leaking out of my ass.”

Ben turns his reddening face towards the ceiling and says conversationally, “So, this is going to make for a fun confession next weekend. I can’t wait to tell my priest.”

“I can’t wait to tell my therapist,” I offer.

“I can’t wait to have my dear friend Travis whisper-yell at me the next time I stop by Starbucks,” Jamie sighs. He reconsiders his words, turns to face me. “Unless you intend to keep this to yourself.”

Slowly, eyes on the ceiling, I shake my head. “No. I’ll tell him. I mean, I’ll have to. This is something he’d want to know about.”

“Will he be angry with you?” Jamie asks.

“No. He will be with me, though,” Ben says. He’s taking off his hoodie and inspecting the shirt underneath for any stray drops of jizz. “He blames me whenever Garen and I do anything.”

It’s not something I can object to. The shouting match they had during Grease rehearsal last October made it pretty clear that Travis assumes any guy I sleep with is… I dunno, taking advantage of my slutty, trusting nature. If Travis decides he wants to scream at someone, it won’t even cross his mind to have that someone be me.

“Have I ever mentioned how peculiar I find it,” Jamie says carefully, inspecting his nails, “that Travis McCall not only disrespected you on a near daily basis when he was your boyfriend, but also seems determined to be even more disrespectful to you now that he’s your ex?”

Ben stops scraping at a drying fleck of come on his shirt and blinks at Jamie. “He’s not—he doesn’t disrespect me.”

“He cheated on you,” Jamie points out.

“He didn’t,” I say sharply. “I’m the one who started that, and it was just a few kisses.”

“Don’t be tedious, darling,” Jamie replies. “Do you honestly think that the specifics of who kissed who, when, and for how long are truly the issue here? Travis cheated on him. It doesn’t matter if it was a single kiss, or a fuck against a brick wall. He touched you, and he felt things for you, and he didn’t give a damn about the effect it might have been having on his boyfriend. He was awful to Ben.”

“And up until a few months ago, so were you,” I snap.

Jamie’s lip curls. “The difference being that I’ve made amends for my behavior. Benjamin and I have discussed our history, and we’ve apologized for our respective wrongs, and we’ve moved forward.” He turns to Ben, who is still just blinking at us both, wide-eyed. “And I hope—I sincerely hope, Ben, that if we ever find ourselves in a situation in which you feel that I’m not treating you with the utmost respect and affection, that you would tell me so that I can adjust my behavior accordingly.”

“Are you intentionally dressing up your language so he won’t realize you’re talking about feelings with him?” I ask.

Jamie’s warm, tanned skin pinks up a little, which is as good as a yes, even if he refuses to acknowledge me directly. Instead, he meets Ben’s gaze with an overwhelming steadiness and says simply, quietly, “I want to be good to you.”

Ben swallows. It’s obvious that he doesn’t have the slightest clue what to say to that. Eventually, he just nods, wordlessly. I stand.

“I’m going to go get cleaned up, like you said earlier,” I say, rolling off the bed and onto my feet. “I can change the sheets when I get back, if you want.”

Jamie makes an agreeable noise, but he’s still looking at Ben. It bothers me more than it probably should.

He claims the entire master bathroom for himself, I claim the guest shower, and Ben sets himself up at the sink near me so he can carefully scrub my come out of his beard. It takes him ages, and he keeps darting annoyed glances at me in the mirror. I’m the first one done and back in the bedroom, so I swap out the messy bedsheets for a new set from the linen closet. The new sheets are crisply folded, even the fitted sheet. I didn’t even know it was possible to fold a fitted sheet.

It’s a while before I hear both showers turn off, but even then, Jamie and Ben don’t return. I can hear quiet voices down the hall. Briefly, I consider sneaking back out of the bed to find out what they’re saying and why the hell they couldn’t say it in front of me. But I don’t. Twenty minutes ago, I felt so connected to both of them. I felt so fucking necessary. The longer I lie here alone, the more that feeling drains out of me. I wish Travis could be here with me. Shit. I’d even settle for having Declan here, though I know he’d be shitty at providing any sort of emotional support. But neither of them is here, not when I need them to be. They’ve left me alone. Ben and Jamie have left me alone.The only person who won’t leave me alone is Dave.

​The thought crawls around inside my skull like an insect. Disturbed, I dismiss the words from my mind as forcefully as I can. I roll onto my side with my aching back to the door, so I won’t have to see Jamie and Ben when they eventually come back to bed. It doesn’t matter. I’m asleep before they return anyway.